Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

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A single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Worse than despair,
Worse than the bitterness of death, is hope.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead —
When the cloud is scattered,
The rainbow's glory is shed.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Thus suicidal selfishness, that blights
The fairest feelings of the opening heart,
Is destined to decay, whilst from the soil
Shall spring all virtue, all delight, all love,
And judgment cease to wage unnatural war
With passion's unsubduable array.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne and yet must bear,
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
His fine wit
Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it.
Of Thomas Love peacock

Percy Bysshe Shelley
In each human heart terror survives
The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear
All that they would disdain to think were true:
Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man's estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.
The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom;
And all best things are thus confused to ill.
Many are strong and rich, and would be just,
But live among their suffering fellow-men
As if none felt: they know not what they do.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Beneath is spread like a green sea
The waveless plain of Lombardy.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met Murder on the way—
He had a mask like Castlereagh—
Very smooth he looked, yet grim,
Seven bloodhounds followed him.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep, — that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
And bid them love each other and be blest:
And leave the troop which errs, and which reproves,
And come and be my guest, — for I am Love's.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep —
He hath awakened from the dream of life.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
There is eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance,
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength;
And if, with infirm hand, Eternity,
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length;
These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o'er the disentangled doom.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
To that high Capital, where kingly Death
Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay,
He came.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Titles are tinsel, power a corrupter, glory a bubble, and excessive wealth a libel on its possessor.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise!
She knew not 'twas her own; as with no stain
She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Religion! but for thee, prolific fiend, Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with men, And heaven with slaves!

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half the human race to misery.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Here I swear, and as I break my oath may Infinity Eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge... Oh, how I wish I were the Antichrist, that it were mine to crush the Demon, to hurl him to his native Hell never to rise again — I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in Poetry.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Dar'st thou amid the varied multitude
To live alone, an isolated thing?

Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: — Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
GOVERNMENT has no rights; it is a delegation from several individuals for the purpose of securing their own. It is therefore just, only so far as it exists by their consent, useful only so far as it operates to their well-being.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The thoughts which the word "God" suggests to the human mind are susceptible of as many variations as human minds themselves.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
With hue like that when some great painter dips
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Less oft is peace in Shelley's mind,
Than calm in waters, seen.

Percy Bysshe Shelley